Ever since Roberto Busa’s well-known Index Thomisticus, the Digital Humanities have had a strong focus on textual material. One reason for the “blind spot” when it comes to analyzing moving images, is the complex nature of film, which entangles different modalities across sound, vision and language. Furthermore, rights issues and lack of availability of (proper) sources still remain a problem for the analysis of large data sets, although audiovisual material becomes gradually more available due to digitization of analog elements and born digital film production.

Nonetheless, a shift toward a greater visibility of film and media studies in the Digital Humanities can be noticed. The planned special issue for Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ) on “Digital Humanities & Film Studies: Analyzing the Modalities of Moving Images” aims to revisit existing quantitative approaches for film analysis and to discuss the possible application of computational methods in this domain. In addition, the special issue aims to contribute to the growing awareness in the field by providing both methodological research as well as presenting case studies of existing (albeit scattered) initiatives and research projects.

Call for presentations:„Challenges in archaeological and historical network analysis“ – Organized session at the XXVIII Sunbelt Conference, June 26-July 1, 2018 at Utrecht University

Over the last decades, network analysis has made its way from a fringe theory to an established methodology in archaeological and historical research that goes beyond a purely metaphorical use of the network term. A substantial number of studies on different topics and periods have shown that network theories and methods can be fruitfully applied to selected bodies of historical and archaeological sources. Yet in many of these initial studies, important methodological concerns regarding the underlying sources, missing data, data standardization and representation of networks in space and time have not been adequately acknowledged and sometimes even completely neglected.

The session invites contributions from researchers applying methods of formal network analysis in archaeological or historical research. A special emphasis of the session will be on the unique challenges that arise in the domain-specific application of these research methods. We welcome submissions on any period, geographical area or topic.

One or more sessions at the 2018 International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA) Sunbelt Conference will focus on archaeological and historical network analysis.

1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War is an English-language online reference work on World War I dedicated to publishing high quality peer-reviewed content. Each article in the encyclopedia is a self-contained publication and its author receives full recognition. All articles receive a distinct URL address as well as a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and are fully citable as scholarly publications. 1914-1918-online is an open access publication, which means that all articles are freely available online, ensuring maximum worldwide dissemination of content.

The editors invite academics to contribute articles on a select number of topics not yet covered by our invitation-only editorial process. The Call for Papers will be automatically updated. Authors who are interested in submitting a paper on any of the subjects listed should submit a short CV with a publication list, as well as an abstract (max. 250 words) or a full-length paper.

Adolf Hitler’s book, written between 1924 and 1926, has received unprecedented media attention lately. Since it has been placed in the public domain on January 1st, 2016, seventy years after its author’s death, there has been a lot of controversy throughout Europe, fuelling reflections on the status to be accorded to a text that has often been mythicized. In Germany, the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (IfZ) has produced an impressive critical edition: The complete text (all known variants having been established) is now available in two bulky volumes with more than 3,500 footnotes and a thorough critical apparatus. Bringing out the text with such an added mass of historical research was a gamble; it seems to be paying off, even though it is still too soon to tell.
The German critical edition will probably provide the basis for coming editions in other languages. An edition project has just been launched in the Netherlands. In France, the announcement in October 2015 of a new edition of Mein Kampf stirred up a brief controversy, which ended in a relative consensus about the need to publish a scholarly edition in French.

The On_Culture Editorial Board would like to announce a special guest issue entitled “Law Undone: De-humanizing, Queering, and Dis-abling the Law – Further Arguments for Law’s Pluralities”, which will be edited by the guest editors Greta Olson (Giessen) and Sonja Schillings (Giessen). The third issue will be released in spring 2017.

Sociological and anthropological approaches to law and legal processes have long suggested that state-made law has to be understood as culturally produced and embedded and thus as but one form of normative ordering amongst others. Culturalist approaches to law such as Law and Narrative, Law and Semiotics, Law and Cultural Studies, and Law and Visual Culture have, similarly and more recently, argued that law neither belongs to an autonomous realm of activity nor transpires with exclusively rational means. Such approaches have also contributed to more subtle understandings of “culture” as neither monolithic, homogenous, nor static.

Posthumanist and queer critiques of law suggest, in turn, that humanism’s conceptualization of rational subjects needs to be rethought as the basis of legal orders. Distinctions between legal persons and non-persons, humans and non-humans rest on a post-Enlightenment project that has privileged the White, Western, Able-Bodied, and Propertied Man as origin and subject.

The On_Culture Editorial Board would like to draw your attention to the Call for Abstracts for the second issue: “The Nonhuman: Concepts, Concerns, and Challenges in the Study of Culture”.

We are particularly calling for ‘creative’ contributions that reflect upon the topic (the Nonhuman) in a non-conventional way: interviews, essays, opinion pieces, reviews of exhibitions, analyses of cultural artifacts and events, photo galleries, videos, works of art… and more!

These contributions (so called “_Perspectives”) are uploaded on a rolling basis, so no deadline applies. Please have a look at the _Perspective section on our website. Interested in contributing? Send your ideas to the Editorial Board at any time: content@on-culture.org. We are looking forward to your ideas and contributions.

The On_Culture Editorial Board would like to draw your attention to the Call for Abstracts for the second issue: “The Nonhuman: Concepts, Concerns, and Challenges in the Study of Culture”.

We are particularly calling for ‘creative’ contributions that reflect upon the topic (the Nonhuman) in a non-conventional way: interviews, essays, opinion pieces, reviews of exhibitions, analyses of cultural artifacts and events, photo galleries, videos, works of art… and more!

These contributions (so called “_Perspectives”) are uploaded on a rolling basis, so no deadline applies. Please have a look at the _Perspective section on our website. Interested in contributing? Send your ideas to the Editorial Board at any time: content@on-culture.org.

The Göttingen Dialog in Digital Humanities has established a forum for the discussion of digital methods applied to all areas of the Humanities and Social Sciences, including Classics, Philosophy, History, Literature, Law, Languages, Archaeology and more. The initiative is organized by the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities (GCDH).

The dialogs will take place every Monday from April 11th until early July 2016 in the form of 90-minute seminars. Seminar content should be of interest to humanists, digital humanists, librarians and computer scientists. Furthermore, we proudly announce that Prof. Dr. Stefan Gradmann (KU Leuven) will be giving the opening keynote on April 11th.